Zu Station

It’s barely lunch-hour but Dave McCabe really needs a drink.
“I’m fucking parched, man,” proclaims The Zutons frontman in a Scouser burr so treacle-thick you could probably use it to plaster that crack in your ceiling. “I’ve been knocking back coffee all morning and I’m gasping.”

Relax, he’s just looking for a glass of water. Fortunately, the Dublin Academy dressing-rooms are generously provisioned: there are rows of bottled Volvic, several bowls of fruit and enough pastries to stuff a piñata. What’s truly grabbing McCabe’s attention, however, is a red suede couch shaped like a pair of pursed lips. Flopping onto it, he runs a hand through his recently cultivated crazy-dude beard, all thoughts of liquid refreshment momentarily pushed to one side.
“They had this sort of stuff all over the place in California,” says McCabe, fresh from soundchecking for this evening’s sell-out Zutons date. “The whole place was blinged to the heavens. We were staying in Hollywood and every single cliché you can think of was true. Maybe it’s different in the rest of Los Angeles but up there, everyone really did seem to want to be a star. Everybody was gorgeous – you were surrounded by perfect bodies and perfect teeth. After a while it can start to drive you mad.”
The Zutons were on the West Coast working with George Drakoulias, proprietor of the legendary Sunset Sound studios, where Fleetwood Mac made Rumours. You get the sense the hook-up wasn’t exactly a meeting of minds. On balance McCabe is happy with the results, the forthcoming LP You Can Do Anything sees the Liverpudlian foursome raise their cheeky ska-inflected pop to fresh heights of artfulness (fan-boys can relax – glamour-puss sax player Abi Harding’s trademark toots are still at the heart of the band’s sound). What did take a little getting used to was Drakoulias’s bone-dry humour. To be polite about it, says McCabe, the guy needed his sarcasm chip disabled.
“I think he was trying to use humour to put us at ease,” he muses, “but he’d just keep it up and keep it up and eventually you’d say to yourself, ‘Oh, be serious will you’. It kind of did our heads in a bit.”
The Zutons cropped up on scenester radars with their cheerfully ramshackle 2004 debut, Who Killed The Zutons?, but had to wait until last year to truly crash the big-time. Ironically, the hit that elevated their stock wasn’t even theirs. It was Amy Winehouse’s sassy revisiting of ‘Valerie’, a stand-out from The Zutons’ second LP, 2006’s Tired of Hanging Around. Looking back, McCabe can’t help but be struck by the fact that Winehouse’s plunge into tabloid notoriety coincided with his song’s stint in the charts. Frankly, he’s worried bad juju might be at play.
“She had a hit with our song shortly before it all seemed to go a bit mad for her. I’d like to think it was a just a coincidence.”
Because Winehouse made the song her own, her version is often mistakenly considered the original, something McCabe claims not to be bothered by.
“I really like Amy’s take on it,” he insists, “but I think ours is better. Well I would say that, wouldn’t I? After all, I wrote the bloody song!”
No Hollywood sojourn would be complete without a spot of star-gazing. In that regard, The Zutons seem to have come up rather short – the only proper film celeb they stumbled upon was Danny de Vito, whom McCabe bumped into at a grocery store.
“Actually, I practically stepped on him because he’s really small. At that point we’d been there a fortnight, and we were over the whole superstar spotting thing. I was actually pretty homesick for Liverpool, which sounds insane I know, considering we were in this beautiful city with perfect weather.”
Still, they did get to meet Scouse legend Ringo Star. The ex-Beatle, who keeps a house in LA, has been a Zutons fan for several years, and arranged a get-together at Sunset Sound.
“The day he visited us, it was meant to be this huge surprise,” Dave recalls, “but we knew he was going to be there. George told us to stay on late at the studio – when we asked why, he started to crack up and said there was a small chance Ringo would be popping by. He was a really nice fella, though he seems to have lost his Liverpool accent. It sounds more transatlantic now.”
Starr, of course, penned the unofficial anthem for Liverpool’s 2008 reign as European City of Culture. Back on Merseyside, cultural mavens have panned the song, ‘Liverpool 8’, as excessively syrupy. What did McCabe think of it?
“Um... best to be diplomatic,” he grins self-consciously. “It think I’d better take a pass on that one.”